In 1998, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania published a study that might strike you as kind of mean.

They took two people with severe amnesia, who couldn’t remember events occurring more than a minute earlier, and fed them lunch. Then a few minutes later, they offered a second lunch. The amnesic patients eagerly ate it. Then a few minutes later, they offered a third lunch, and the patients ate that, too. Days later, they repeated the experiment, telling two people with no short-term memory that it was lunch time over and over and observing them readily eat multiple meals in a short period of time.

This might seem like a somewhat trivial discovery, but it unveils a simple truth about why we eat. Hunger doesn’t come from our stomachs alone. It comes from our heads, too. We need our active memories to know when to begin and end a meal.

While our stomachs know exactly what food we’re eating (since they’re the organ responsible for processing it) our brains are a bit more easily tricked. In this month's Journal of Consumer Research, two studies on our brains and food open a crack into a depressing world of the eating brain's awful gullibility.

How Menus Trick Us

Calorie counts can be good things. Even if they don’t dramatically change our behavior, studies have shown that they gently nudge both foodies and restaurants toward lower-calorie fare. But a new study from JCR found that there’s an easy way to eliminate the benefit of calorie counts. If you organize all the healthy dishes into a single “low-cal” category, it ironically diminishes all of the positive effects of calorie-posting. Having a separate Health Menu lets people consider the Health Menu separately. They feel good that it’s there, and then they proceed to order the same fatty stuff they wanted to eat in the first place.

How Food Tricks Us

Simply labeling a food as “healthy” makes it taste worse. But what tricky qualities make unhealthy food taste healthy?

In a series of studies written up in the latest JCR, researchers asked participants to eat bite-sized brownies while watching TV (fun!). Some of the brownies were hard and some were soft. Subjects ate more soft brownies when they weren’t prompted by any questions. But when they were told to think about calorie content, they switched and suddenly ate more rough brownies. To the eating brain, harder-to-eat equals healthier-to-eat.

The study fits neatly into a body of evidence that suggests that foods with rough textures feel heartier and healthier, even when they have the exact same nutritional qualities as softer versions. "Granola bars, trail mixes, nuts, and many cereals, in spite of being high in calories, often are perceived to be healthy probably because” their roughness feels less luxuriant and requires more work to break into swallow-able piece, the researchers conclude. The implications of this idea are sort of fascinating for fast-food companies: If you want your greasy stuff to feel healthier, make it rougher. In fact, Burger King’s new line of fries — Satisfries — were explicitly given a rougher texture.

How Ambience Tricks Us

Temperature, lighting, smells, noise: Researchers call them “atmospherics.” I prefer to call it “ambience.” Whatever you call it, these factors have a surprising ability to distract us from our food and change how much we eat. A lit review from Insead showed that:

People eat more in restaurants when the temperature is cool, possibly because we need more energy to warm up;

Soft lighting (candlelight, in particular) puts us at ease and makes us eat for longer periods of time, while bright lights make us eat faster;

Nice smells were shown to increase soda consumption in movie-watching experiments, while awful smells make us feel full faster

Social distractions — particularly watching TV or eating with friends — can lead to longer periods of eating because, like the amnesic patients at the top of the article, they make us forget what we’ve just consumed.

How Rules Trick Us

When we want to be responsible (i.e. study for a test, stay on a diet), we're most successful when confronted with really obvious forms of temptation.

If you need to study and your buddy says, “we’re going to a strip club!” your brain will be like, well I definitely can’t study at a strip club, so no. But what if that friend says, “we’re going to a coffee shop, come get a latte”? A cup of coffee is a less obvious violation of studying than a lap dance. Your brain doesn’t outright reject the idea of a coffee shop immediately. Maybe you go to the coffee shop, get into a 45-minute discussion about Captain America, wind up doing the same amount of productive studying as if you’d gone to a club, and flunk the test. The lesser temptation ironically proved even more tempting—and even more disastrous.

The curse of the lesser temptation applies to food, too. Say you’re on a diet and the waiter asks if you want the Chocolate Mount Vesuvius Cake. Your brain goes wow, that is really obviously unhealthy, no way. But if the waiter offers an array of smaller, less obviously unhealthy options (pana cotta with fresh fruit!), the force of the temptation feels less obvious, and your self-regulating mechanism doesn’t blare so loudly. Researchers have consistently found that obvious violations to our diet are easily rejected. But less obvious violations lead us consistently to temptation, because they disarm our fine-tuned self-regulating mechanisms.

How Salads Trick Us

In the mid-2000s, McDonald’s got more aggressive about promoting healthy options like salads and fruit. But its turnaround in those years was due entirely to people eating more "fast-food basics" off the Dollar Menu, like cheeseburgers and fried chicken. Promoting healthy options seemed to lure wannabe-dieters into the restaurant, only to see them order the standard greasy fare.

One theory behind this weirdness is called “vicarious goal fulfillment.” It’s the idea that the mere presence of healthy options like salad at a restaurant can ironically lead to eating less healthy food. Including a healthy option in an array of unhealthy foods can lead to more indulgence, according to a CUNY study from 2013. Researchers found that including salad on a menu of sides with french fries, chicken nuggets, and baked potato increased the odds that health-concious people would order the greasy fries rather than reject all of the options. The researchers concluded that for many of us, merely considering a healthy option satisfies our goal to be healthy, giving us license to indulge in fatty foods.

How Restaurants Trick Us

“Healthy" restaurants have unhealthy consequences. A 2007 study found that we wildly underestimate 1,000-calorie meals at “healthy” restaurants like Subway considerably more than same-calorie meals at McDonald’s. “Remarkably the biasing effect of health claims on calorie estimations are as strong for consumers highly involved in nutrition as for consumers with little interest in nutrition or healthy eating,” they wrote. Previous studies found that we order higher calorie side dishes at restaurants with healthy reputations

Although obesity is a messy dish with a million ingredients, this ironic “health” halo is considered partly responsible of the fact that, between 1991 and 2001, adult obesity rates grew from 23 to 31 percent while the share of Americans eating low-calorie food grew from 48 to 60 percent.

How Labels Trick Us

We are “a country of low-fat foods and high-fat people,” Brian Wansink and Pierre Chandon begin memorably in their paper showing that “low-fat” labels can contribute to over-eating, just as previous studies showed that labeling food samples as “small” seems to reduce our consumption guilt and encourage us to eat too much.

​Labeling snacks as "low-fat” can increase consumption by as much as 50 percent, they conclude. Across three studies, they show that low-fat labels lead all consumers—particularly those who are overweight—to overeat snack foods by as much as 50 percent above their target. In this way, healthy labels that ostensibly train us to pay attention to what we eat ironically make us more mindless when we’re snacking.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.